Long rant, but a lot of these issues are abstract to people who don't understand the feeling. I would love to be a whole and uncaring human again, but I can't. I've tried. That's why I don't mind 'missing out' because of a trigger warning.

and honestly, I think that the portrayal of "overcoming your fears" in most works of art is the reason people have such a distorted view of trauma and PTSD.

I mean, almost any movie or game you play that has a character with a crippling fear, has that character overcome the fear through sheer force of will and the encouragement of friends.

take, for example, P2: Innocent Sin. one of the main characters has a complete breakdown when witnessing a burning building because she was trapped in a shrine as a child and suffered severe burns when it caught fire.

from the first time you witness this, you can tell it's absolutely crippling. she's screaming for her dead father to save her, thinks her hands are burning, all that.

in the period of what can't be more than a few hours in-game, the party rushes to three other buildings that are wired to explode any second. at the third building, she is magically able to overcome her fears and run through a burning museum to save children and even jump on a suspended airplane in the middle of the fire to rescue an enemy.

obviously there's the issue of time in most works, so if they were to include the years of therapy and multiple relapses that could occur in your average handling of psychological trauma, movies would have to be six or seven hours long and games would still require multiple discs.

but, to me, this seems like what causes some of this misperceptions and outright terrible ideas on how to handle trauma or triggering things. a lot of people seem to be under the belief that someone can overcome these issues if they just dive head first into their fear and really wish themselves to overcome it.

that's completely at odds with reality. I have friends who still have trouble witnessing sexual violence due to being raped as a kid, even though they've been in therapy for years.

granted, this theory is based solely from my ass, but I like to think it makes sense.

you know there's a difference between "offensive" and "graphically obscene" right?

I mean, I just finished Persona 2: Innocent Sin and that game dealt with a lot of heavy shit but I never had to witness someone's head exploding in slow motion, nor did I have to read a text box that described rape down to the motion of the pubic hairs.

and nobody is trying to "remove all possible triggers from literature." like, where in the fuck do you people get this conspiracy theory from? so many people seem to think that trigger warning = censorship for absolutely no reason other than to make themselves become a victim of "the PC police" and wax poetic about how "triggers might be real but you're all probably making it up anyway".

jesus christ, I thought hubski was supposed to be better than reddit but it's like all the FPHers and gamergaters are just flooding this place.

I mean, you know there was a time where you could get beaten with a ruler for having your knees show, right? Or where saying anything that could be remotely perceived as sympathetic to communism could make you unemployable and publicly shamed?

I'd say that, as far as PC goes, we've come a long way towards letting people be open.

Besides, if you really want to talk about PC gone wild, maybe you should be focusing on Texas' schoolbooks rewriting history by excluding Jim Crow laws, instead of a teacher giving students the ability to read something different for their class.

And that's mainly because the people who most often get angry about trigger warnings have never experienced the kind of psychological trauma that results in someone having a complete and total loss of their faculties when triggered.

Shit, I didn't even realize how serious this shit could be until I spent time in a mental hospital as a patient.

The things that really get me are when kids in elementary school are expelled and shit for drawing a gun or making a poptart pistol.

This part really sticks out to me, because the "pop tart pistol" you're referencing is a clear case of people accepting what they're told second hand rather than looking into the issue themselves.

That kid wasn't expelled for his pop tart, he was kicked out because he had frequently misbehaved, including trying to grope other students, and neither him nor his parents attempted to change his behavior.

And that's where I honestly believe a lot of this "PC is ruining the world!" rhetoric comes from: places like /r/TumblrInAction and media outlets that function on the same plane are able to share false information or make it incredibly misleading, and it becomes "truth" because people would rather believe a title telling them the world is going to shit than spend a few minutes google and reading articles showing that no, the world is actually doing ok all things considered.

I didn't know Miley Cyrus had a career. I think you're being facetious, but there are at least one or two even more ridiculous things going on in the world. I have no idea how the hell she would have a career though.

I mean, she's on tours, she's got famous photoshoots, she's been in the media pretty frequently and a lot of people really like her music.

Why am I the facetious one when you're denying that she has a career?

To me, people of color sounds more racist than PC.

Are you a person of color? Because, let's be honest, the majority of people who seem to find PoC to be a problematic term are not PoC, and just want to insert themselves into the conversation.

The fact is, PoC has become a widely accepted term by people who happen to be of color. That's because calling someone black or african very easily associates someone with a race/country/nationality that they very well may not be part of.

I don't believe that we need to say stuff like "cerebrally challenged"

1. This is the first time I've ever heard this term.

2. Are you implying that psychological diagnoses are not...ok? Like...if someone has developmental issues, what are you wanting their condition to be referred to as?

or "door person" instead of doorman/doorwoman(if that's a thing).

I can honestly say that, other than blatant trolls TiA and reddit in general has fallen for, I have never seen someone actually throw a fit about the nomenclature used to refer to people who hold jobs related to doors.

Again, this comes back to what I said before, that a lot of this "PC is ruining the world" rhetoric seems based entirely on secondhand information or actual bullshit. Like you're creating a world where you're the victim of other people who don't actually exist.

It's obnoxious. If the person I'm talking to can't figure out what I mean, then they can ask, but I loathe when someone tells me in that snarky, holier-than-thou tone to use the PC term.

Do you consider their tone snarky because they're asking you to use a different word than, say, "retard" or "faggot"? Are you sure you aren't just taking offense to someone asking that you acknowledge their humanity just as much as they acknowledge yours?

It feels like you've created a caricature of socially-minded liberals that, I'll be honest, doesn't exist outside of the deepest, darkest, trolliest parts of tumblr and maybe the occasional college freshman who just learned about feminism and got over-excited.

I honestly believe that if we stop giving special little groups for everything, that we'll become a more homogeneous society. Everyone wants to be a special butterfly, but we're forgetting that we're all just humans.

And you're forgetting that not all humans have the same experiences nor are all humans treated equally both under the law and in general.

What you're essentially saying here is that transgender people should just shut the fuck up and act normal and they'll stop getting killed. That PoC should stop caring about the disproportionate force used against them by police time and time again because hashtag all lives matter.

I'm tall as hell (6'5"/198.12cm) but I don't need someone to call me vertically advantaged.

Can't imagine that'll ever happen.

I'm not very empathetic, but I don't want someone to call me emotionally challenged or whatever the hell you'd call it.

Mk, but you know that there are legitimate mental illnesses and disorders that can cause people to have problems with empathy or expressing and controlling their emotions, right? I've been diagnosed as bipolar, with ADHD, and PTSD. If you haven't been diagnosed has having mental issues, then I highly doubt anyone will refer to you as emotionally challenged, unless they're doing so as a joke or insult.

I have varying aspects of my being just like any other person. I don't need or want to be placed in a special category besides "human being." Bam. Give me my rights. Treat me like everyone else. Give me a fair go. I think that's what everyone else really wants (maybe not the "no special category" thing, but the rights and whatnot.) Why it's not that way, I'm really not sure.

It's not that way because, no matter how much you hope and wish and dream that every human is the same, we're a very troubled species that has a lot of issues with anything different from us.

It's not that way because, no matter how much we would all love to be treated equally, we still have elected officials with immense power that use said power to keep women and minorities "in their place" and at a disadvantage.

What you need to do is face up to reality. You need to accept that people are going to have their "special categories" because they want to SHOW YOU why the status quo, heterosexual white male perception of the world is flawed, because the people in those "special categories" are treated unfairly and have a lot of obstacles that most white, straight people will never experience.

Now, have the dynamics improved compared to even fifty years ago? Sure! But we're far and away from an equal world, much less a single country in that world having equality, much less a single state in the USA having equality.

I think that we're shifting into the realm of pandering to every little thing that makes people feel weird inside and it takes away from those that have actual issues.

I'd like to know what leads you to believe this. If we were really shifting into "the realm of pandering to every little thing that makes people feel weird inside" then how would shows like Modern Family be possible considering how many people have very strong hate against homosexuality? How did same-sex marriage become legal in the entire country? How does Miley Cyrus have a career at all?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I used to think this was definitely happening, back when I was a regular on /r/TumblrInAction. But people have been claiming for decades that "the PC police is ruining the world" yet we've had a golden age of television during that time with shows like Seinfeld, Breaking Bad, The Wire, and Game of Thrones.

And yes, many people will have things that set them off, but most of the time you have to intentionally be an asshole to set off important things (for example, jokes about rape, domestic abuse, death in general, etc.).

And that's where the divide really shows itself. In general, and obviously this is anecdotal, the people I speak to who are most critical of trigger warnings are the ones who express that no joke should be off-limits. So there's this worry that trigger warnings = censorship = jokes about rape not being allowed.

Which is flawed thinking, in my opinion. Trigger warnings aren't meant to censor anything, they're in fact meant to allow people to create whatever they want while taking a quick second to warn potential consumers that there might be some graphic or obscene material within.

The trigger warnings = censorship thinking seems, to me, like one that has a subtle slippery slope most people don't consider. What I mean by that is, it seems people thing trigger warnings need to be given out for literally anything that someone might not like.

And I just don't see that happening. I don't think we're going to get to a point where someone requires every article to put trigger warnings in it for a political viewpoint just so they don't end up upsetting someone who doesn't agree with that viewpoint.

Trigger warnings are meant for the types of things that can cause psychological demons to resurface and put someone in major distress. I can't say I've ever met someone who undergoes an anxiety attack because they read a conservative viewpoint on Fox News. But I've met someone who had no warning that The Hills Have Eyes was going to contain a graphic rape scene, and had a massive breakdown because her father had raped her years earlier.

Sure, someone could say, "But people can suffer PTSD from lots of things so there might just be someone out there who gets triggered by Fox News and now you're requiring them to put warnings on their articles!" However, I'd have to see some evidence and proof and hear from actual professionals to believe that someone would be diagnosed has having Fox News be their trigger due to some event that occurred in their life, rather than something much more traumatic that has some real research explaining it.

I'm simply saying it needs to be overcome and that takes effort not censorship of everyone around you.

So...asking people to maybe not make jokes about dead babies around a woman who just suffered a miscarriage that caused PTSD is censorship.

Sorry, but I'm no longer going to participate in this discussion. It's clear we fundamentally disagree on societal interaction, the definition of censorship, and whether or not a person suffering from crippling mental illness should be blamed for not signing up with the first therapist they can find and being back to normal in a week.

However it's also important for those people with triggers to not hide behind them and to learn to overcome them.

Yes, but the way to do so should be handled by a professional, like you said. What happens the most on the internet is that anyone who mentions that certain things trigger them is immediately spammed with endless copypasta and jokes about "LE TRIGGERED LOLLOLOLOLOLOLOL I M LE ATTACK COPTER". And more than likely, that person will be sent the exact things that they mentioned trigger them, because the internet is a horrible place and gives praise to the most horrible actions.

I don't think anyone with triggers is trying to "hide behind them" other than the very tiny amount of people on tumblr who misuse them and that nobody would ever even know about if not for places like /r/TumblrInAction going out of their way to find, highlight, and declare "THIS IS WHAT ALL SJWS ARE LIKE AND THEY'RE COMING FOR YOU".

Yes, the world is a less than forgiving place, but that doesn't mean we should expect people who have experienced extreme trauma to just suck it up and deal with it. I spent time in a mental hospital and would've honestly beat the shit out of anyone who said that, because there were people there such as a woman in her forties who lost both of her daughters in the span of a year, with the last one dying due to a house fire she was in with her.

If that woman has trouble being around fire, are you really going to tell her, "Suck it up. Fire happens, and I'm not going to stop making jokes about dead babies in fires just to accommodate your little trigger thing"?

Basically, the new CEO is making it so that reddit's user numbers will see a nice increase as anybody who wants to visit coontown--whether to document it for a professional or personal reason, to see it just to confirm its terribleness, or to participate in it--will have to make an account.

The new CEO is also saying that reddit will be subsidizing coontown since he claims they won't be making revenue off of it. So they are willing to host racist content for free, with no ads whatsoever on that sub.

Of course, it's bullshit to claim they won't make any revenue off of it. The accounts created to see it will make their user numbers look better to advertisers and potential buyers. The accounts created to see it very likely won't stay "contained" in that single sub, so those users will help reddit generate revenue elsewhere on the site, likely by submitting racist content to other subs like TIL or gilding people.

This is the shit that redditors should've been angry about for days at a time, plastering memes and shit all over the front page while blacking out their subreddits.

Instead, nothing is going to happen and the worst of reddit get to rejoice in their newfound freedom.

Nah, alt accounts are a thing. That person will just have a very angry conversation with themselves.

I don't, unfortunately. I had it as my twitter background, and saved it before changing my background, but the laptop it was saved on lost a fight with a jaegerbomb and I hadn't invested in a backup drive at the time.

I'll dig around some of my abandoned social media accounts and see if it's hiding somewhere though.

I bet you would've made one better and it would've sold like cold cakes that your toaster would turn into hotcakes.

This might be unbelievable, but I straight up invented the iPhone like a year before it came out.

I was in high school and one of the students in a pilot Digital Art class. The teacher gave us a project to design an ad for a product we'd make up ourselves.

The product I made up was a touchscreen phone with WiFi and cellular connections that could play MP3s and movie files, with a camera, square icons, and a single navigational button.

I didn't call it the iPhone, I don't actually remember what name I gave it, but the ad I designed was some pastel clouds with a gradient to them that dropped realistic looking rain into a puddle in the shape of the phone, with a stark white background and black text behind the rain drops that said, "It's raining possibilities."

It used to be my twitter background for years 'cause I was so proud of learning how to make raindrops that had a shiny reflection and warped the text behind them.

As far as more abstract ideas:

What if Tekken (the live-action movie, not the animated movie nor the game) was a better parallel for the direction the world is taking than 1984 or Brave New World?

I mean, like...in that world, corporations have become the governments and states/countries. Look at how much power Google currently holds, how much they control, and how much momentum they have. Oil companies, energy companies, all sorts that make things we absolutely can't live without and have what feels like limitless funds.

That's actually what gave rise to the original men's rights movements in austria; they did not approve of women entering the workforce and felt it was a threat to societal and legal institutions.

Eh, I'm not in a state to do anything at the moment. I'm deep in debt from the one year of college I went to in the states, have a lot of mental diagnoses that I'm no longer able to afford medication for, and living in an area with absolutely no jobs unless I want to work part time, one day every two weeks at a gas station for minimum wage.

Right now, I'm just trying to get myself to a place where I can function in society, let alone handle school.

Always dreamed of living in London, and had actually planned to go to school there for graphic design until I realized the school I was looking into was a shitty degree mill.

Wouldn't mind visiting Tokyo at some point as well, just to experience some of the culture there.

But, I always get the urge to leave the nest after I've settled down in one place for more than a year.

Oh certainly. I'm just saying that, with that property, they didn't have to rely on physical force as much to discriminate because they could use laws, courts, and the realm of business in their favor instead.

That's not to say physical force wouldn't still be used. I'd just figure that, at the higher echelons of wealth and society, those men would be more likely to use their soft power.

I'd say physical force and also being, historically, the majority owners of property. I don't know how much the latter dynamic has shifted in modern times, but I think that likely played a role in keeping women out of power.

thanks for the offer, but I'm talked out. i've been off of my meds involuntarily for almost two years now and no amount of talking has improved anything. I just want a job or a winning lotto ticket so i can afford to get my scripts again.